As software-as-a-service (SAAS) adoption rises in the workplace, business managers
must not overlook a key issue when selecting a Web-hosted applications suite:
a service-level agreement.

Such contractual agreements, known as SLAs, bind the SAAS provider to meet
specified levels of service. An SLA can address various aspects of the service,
such as application uptime and performance, as well as data security, backup,
recovery, and integrity. The SLA outlines penalties -- often in the form of
credits -- if certain standards aren't met.

An SLA is of particular importance for a hosted application, since in that
case the customer is giving up control over the software and thus has little
or no power to fix problems that arise on the SAAS vendor's end.

In other words, a business manager must make sure that a selected SAAS vendor
can provide the level of reliable service the company needs. "IT [and business]
managers need to understand the consequences for their operations if there's
a problem. [They should] determine what downtime they can tolerate and compare
that with what the vendor is offering," says Eric Maiwald, a Burton
Group analyst.

Once a contract is signed and the hosted applications are implemented and woven
into a company's workflow, migrating away to another provider will be costly
and time-consuming.

Few agreements available

Unfortunately, SLAs are far from prevalent among SAAS vendors -- and when offered,
the standard agreements typically are thin and limited. That goes for large
and small vendors alike. "For the most part, SLAs haven't been in place
for the broad cross-section of SAAS [offerings] currently available," says
Jeff Kaplan, a ThinkStrategies
analyst.

For example, the Google Apps Premier Edition suite contains an availability
guarantee only for its Gmail portion (for 99.9 percent uptime) and offers no
commitment for the other components, which include word processing, spreadsheet,
and presentation software.

"It would be comforting to have an SLA that covered the entire suite,"
says Mark Harrison, founding partner of Abraham
Harrison LLC, provider of online marketing services.

Abraham Harrison, founded in late 2006 and incorporated in early 2007, has
been using Google Apps Premier Edition for about one year, and the uptime of
its hosted applications and services, though not 100 percent, has been excellent,
according to Mark Harrison. Downtime incidents have been rare and brief, and
have never proven disruptive to the company's operations, he says. "We've
never been crippled by an outage," Harrison says.

Still, should a significant Google Apps outage occur, it certainly would impact
the company, which is highly dependent on the suite. The company chose Google
Apps in order to give its geographically dispersed staff an array of

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